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Roktrack - Pylon Guided Mower

A mower not only for your yard, but also for your community.

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Rice terrace exist in the mountainous regions of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, where rice is the staple food. This beautiful landscape will disappear sooner or later due to the trend of population outflow to cities in many areas.
I live in a terraced rice field area in Japan, and it is unlikely to last another 10 years. Weeding is a huge challenge in these areas. We have to work frequently in scattered areas. Moreover, in many cases the work must be done by elderly people who have difficulty using smartphones.
So I created a robotic mower that can automatically cut the weeds by simply placing pylons around the area and turning on a switch. This mower is lightweight and can be carried by the elderly and women, and there is no need to lay wires or use a smartphone to operate it. There is no need to risk your life weeding in the heat of summer. Turn it on and the weeding is done while you're having a cup of tea in a cool place.

How dose it work.

Roktrack heads to the pylon recognized based on camera image. When it approaches the pylon more than a certain amount, it turns around and searches fot next one. By speeding up the turning timing with each lap, it will enter from the outside to the inside. A custom model trained on pylon images in yolov8 is used for recognition. Object detection shows the height of the pylon. By determining how high to approach, the turning timing is adjusted.

4 parallel work
Four robots mowing in parallel.
one robot mowing.
One robot is mowing the grass.
Driving Route
Driving route

Blades

It is equipped with two blades. This allows pebbles to be ejected backward when they hit the blades, making the blades more durable. The upward-facing nylon cord prevents weed from tangling around the motor shaft.

With a single blade, the blade must be enlarged to the limit of the body's width in order to provide as much cutting width as possible. Then, in an environment where there are pebbles, the pebbles will get caught between the blade and the body. This would be a disaster, the fuse would blow in an instant, and the blade would be very badly damaged. It took more than 30 fuses and dozens of blades to achieve this shape. Now the grass is not tangled at all and the blades function for dozens of hours. This shape of blade allows mowing of weeds and grass up to 15 cm.

Rough Terrain

Eccentric tires on the outside of the sprockets allow the machine to overcome bumps of up to 5 cm. No additional actuator is required as the tire is directly attached to the sprocket.


Exterior

Front view
Front view
Rear view
Rear view

Interior

Inside of roktrack
Inside of roktrack

The motor for mowing is controlled by a relay and turns only in a single direction. In the process of prototyping, I found that it is difficult to prevent weed from wrapping around by rotating the motor in the opposite direction. It would be very costly to reverse the motor and stop it at just the right moment when it starts to get entangled. So, as mentioned above, I prevent the weed from getting entangled by devising the shape of the blade.

Best pylon color

The color of the pylon, which has a high recognition rate and can be detected from a distance, is red. Blue and green are more common in nature, so the recognition rate of blue and green is low.

Spec

Weight5~7kg
BatteryLifepo4 4S 12.8V
Pylon Recognizable Distance15~30m
Maximum working area20m * 20m
Working hours per charge2~3 hours
Mowing width20cm
Speed1 km/h
Raw Material Cost$330
Recognizable ObjectPylon, Person, Roktrack, Digit, Animals

Solar Power

Roktrack can also be recharged by solar panels, and if the weather is clear, it will continue to mow the weed automatically for about 15 minutes a day, permanently.

The solar panels generate 4W each at an open circuit voltage of 22V according to the data sheet. In reality, they generate about half that amount. Charge and discharge management is done by an off-the-shelf solar charge controller. These controllers can be set for cutoff and return voltages. If I set the cutoff to 12.7V and the return voltage to 13.2V, the system runs for 10-15 minutes every day when the weather is nice. If the cutoff voltage is lowered and the reset voltage is increased, it can run for an hour once every few days. At first I was trying to properly calculate the amount of charge, etc., but the voltage drop caused by the mowing motor (RS775) was so severe that I gave up trying to calculate it accurately. I decided on a setting that would work to some degree each day by changing the cutoff and return voltage over several days.

Wiring Diagram

*Each component is an image and differs from the actual component used.

Multi Node

Steep Slope

If two units work together, they can handle slopes of up to 60 degrees simply by adding wires and pulleys.

Experiment video.

Control App

Basically, all you have to do is press the power button to start cutting the grass, but you can...

Read more »

2dcad.zip

2d cad data for body panels.

x-zip-compressed - 51.84 kB - 05/09/2023 at 01:11

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View all 71 components

  • As a surveillance camera while charging.

    Yuta Suito4 hours ago 0 comments

    It is now possible to monitor people and animals while charging.
    When a person or animal is detected, a notification with an image is sent to a messaging application. (Currently, the system is compatible with LINE, a popular messaging application in Japan.)


    Detectable objects are as follows.

    Person Monitoring Mode

    • Person

    Animal Monitoring Modes

    • bear
    • deer
    • monkey
    • boar
    • badger
    • cat
    • civet
    • dog
    • fox
    • hare
    • mice
    • racoon
    • squirrel

    I am excited about the many things we can do by preparing learned models as needed. I would like to add functions such as a simple patrol robot.

  • Digit OCR Mowing

    Yuta Suito5 days ago 0 comments

    Roktrack can basically mow the weed with just a pylon(traffic cone). However, if the pylon happens to be on the neighbor's house, or if a truck happens to be passing by with a pylon on it, the mower will head in that direction. Digit OCR was designed to address these issues. To achieve this additional functionality, all that is needed is to attach a piece of paper with a single digit number printed on it to the pylon. The robot identifies individual pylons by recognizing this number. This means that it can select the pylon it should aim for among the pylons in its field of vision. This inhibits unexpected movements.

    Why OCR? Generally, AR markers and QR codes are used for robotic applications. To use these, it is important to be able to detect edges. However, in reality, the edges of markers are blurred when trying to detect them from a distance of 10m or more. I have come to the conclusion that it is difficult to identify a marker from a distance of more than 10 meters with a wide-angle camera. In order to detect objects with blurred details, object detection, which can use more ambiguous features, was suitable. In order to increase the detection distance and speed up the processing, the following is processed.

    The image is captured by the camera at the highest resolution. The resolution of that image is then reduced to perform inference in the pylon model. The detection content is normalized and the corresponding portion of the original highest resolution is extracted. The extracted part is then inferred by the Digit OCR model with a resolution of 96*96 to identify what numbers are pasted on the pylon. And since the existing OCR model for transcribing text takes several seconds to infer, I created a very simple custom model that can collect images of numbers and detect only the digits 0-9.

  • Weather resistance

    Yuta Suito5 days ago 0 comments

    Rainproof

    L-shaped angles are affixed downward to the top panel to prevent rain from the upper direction. At the rear of the body are components that should not be wetted by water, such as air intakes, power switches, and charging connectors. On a strong rainy day, the splash guard protects them from being hit on the ground and bouncing rain on these. To prevent insect infestation, sponge tape is applied to the tops of the front, rear, and side panels to make them airtight.

    Against condensation

    If the robot is left outdoors, condensation will form inside the robot in the morning on days with large temperature differences. When charcoal is placed inside, the charcoal absorbs excess moisture and condensation no longer occurs.

  • Released a weed cutting program written in Rust.

    Yuta Suito09/13/2023 at 12:44 0 comments

    I have released a program that allows you to cut the grass by simply placing pylons.

    Please refer to README.md on github or BUILD INSTRUCTIONS on this project page for installation instructions.

    Features

    In addition to the mode to fill in polygons surrounded by pylons, the following modes are implemented.

    • Follow the pylons in a straight line
    • A mode to move back and forth between people and pylons.
    • Continuously tracking a person
    • Surveillance camera mode to detect person
    • Surveillance camera mode to detect 13 types of animals

    Switch from Python to Rust

    This project primarily uses the Rapsberry Pi 3A+. However, when I tried to load multiple models for object detection to make it more versatile, the memory was running out and I was approaching the limit. So I took a leap of faith and ported the program to Rust, and the memory usage was reduced to less than half!!! Now I can add further functionality with adding an image recognition model, etc. However, compiling Rust is either incredibly slow or impossible on the Rapsberry Pi3A+, which has little memory. So when developing, you can use a Raspberry Pi4B (which is also quite slow) or run Ubuntu 20.04 on an AWS Graviton instance (t4g) and compile to increase your development efficiency. Since both Raspberry Pi 64bit and AWS Graviton are aarch64 architecture, you can use them as they are by copying the binaries. Maybe M1 Mac can compile it (I don't have it, so I haven't been able to verify).

    Unanticipated improvements

    Elimination of slowdown during long runs

    In the Python version, after about 30 minutes of mowing, the object detection speed started to slow down. The Rust version keeps the same speed as the startup, even after running for more than an hour.

    PWM malfunction where Wifi is unstable

    When running the Python (gpiozero or pigpio) version of the program in a place with an unstable Wifi connection, the PWM malfunctioned and the Pin was always HIGH. This was causing serious problems, such as the robot falling down a cliff and breaking. So until now, I have been using the robot offline with the Wifi function disabled. However, when I ran the Rust (rppal) version under the same environment, that did not happen. Now I can have a Wifi connection during operation. I have to consider new features due to this new possibility.

  • MagPi issue #133 showcase Roktrack

    Yuta Suito08/31/2023 at 13:23 0 comments

    Roktrack was featured in The MagPi magazine! I would be happy if you could check it out. I am very grateful to the MagPi's writers and editor for the great article and to the Hackaday platform for providing me with this opportunity.

    https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-magpi-magazine-issue-133

  • How to store persistent data on a read-only SD card.

    Yuta Suito08/24/2023 at 21:25 0 comments

    When using the Raspberry Pi in an embedded system, make the SD card read-only to prevent system corruption. In this case, data such as logs and images cannot be stored. In this article, I will show you how to save data to this SD card.

    Create a file system for data

    Plug the SD card into a desktop Linux machine separate from the Raspberry Pi. unmount, resize, and shrink the root file system using Gnome Disks or similar. This will create a free space, so create a file system in that area with FAT.

    Auto mount setting

    After returning the sd card to the raspberry pi, edit /etc/fstab and set the file system for data to be mounted automatically.

    pi@roktrack1:~ $ cat /etc/fstab
    proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
    PARTUUID=dc22932d-01  /boot           vfat    defaults          0       2
    PARTUUID=dc22932d-02  /               ext4    defaults,noatime  0       1
    # a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here
    #   use  dphys-swapfile swap[on|off]  for that
    PARTUUID=dc22932d-03  /data           vfat    auto,exec,umask=000  0    1
    

     Add the last line of the above configuration to your fstab. When you do so, modify PARTUUID to the ID of your environment. You have now created a persitent area on your read-only Raspberry Pi.

    Convert to read-only

    sudo raspi-config nonint enable_overlayfs
    sudo systemctl reboot

     After several dozen power-off tests, the system area was not corrupted and did not become unbootable. Files in the file system for data may be corrupted, but even partial corruption of data such as logs and images will have only localized effects.

  • Why is the camera high-mounted?

    Yuta Suito08/21/2023 at 17:52 0 comments

    Unlike ordinary robotic mowers and robotic cleaners, Roktrack is equipped with a camera mounted quite high. There are two reasons for this.

    Higher than weeds

    Due to the nature of this mower, which aims at pylons and advances toward them, it is impossible to work without seeing the pylons. The camera needs to be high-mounted to ensure visibility above the height of the weeds.

    Recognition rate of object detection

    In my prototypes, the higher the camera mount, the more distant objects tended to be detected by object detection. This is despite the fact that the images for the training data were taken with a low mount. In my experiments, I was able to detect objects quite far away when the camera was raised to about person's eye level, but I settled on the current height of about 50 cm due to the need for portability.

  • Converted to aluminum sheet metal.

    Yuta Suito06/28/2023 at 05:37 0 comments

    Originally, the chassis of the Roktrack was made of aluminum composite plate, but it was not strong enough, and the motor mounting points were sometimes tilted. Above all, it was very difficult to drill many holes by hand.

    Then we received an offer from PCBWay. It was my first time to use a sheet metal service, but all I had to do was send them a dxf file and they sent me a precisely machined 2mm aluminum sheet.

    Unlike manual machining, the motors and other components were accurately installed in one shot, and the parts did not deflect or tilt under load. Compared to the aluminum composite sheets we have used in the past, the reliability has increased overwhelmingly.

    My first experience with sheet metal in my life ended in success. We plan to increase production in the future and are considering using sheet metal services instead of hand fabrication.

  • Expand the available memory area of RPi3A+ made read-only.

    Yuta Suito06/27/2023 at 14:01 0 comments

    The RPi3A+, which has been converted to readonly, by default has only about 180 MB of memory available for applications, which tends to be a bit insufficient for running heavy applications.

    This log describes how to allocate more memory on RPi3A+ in readonly state.

    It is assumed to run offline and headless with Raspberry pi OS 64bit Lite.

    1. Reduce the area allocated as overlay. By default, half of the total memory is allocated, but for readonly applications, the write area is not that necessary, so we will reduce it to 100MB. Modify "/usr/bin/raspi-config".

    - mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /upper
    + mount -t tmpfs -o size=100M tmpfs /upper

     2. If swap is not disabled, the overlay area will be occupied by the swap file (/var/swap) when readonly is enabled. The default setting is 100MB, so 100MB of valuable overlay area will be wasted.

    sudo sed -i -e "s/^CONF_SWAPSIZE=.*/CONF_SWAPSIZE=0/g" /etc/dphys-swapfile

    3. gpu memory is not needed for headless operation, so it is reduced to the limit.

    sudo raspi-config nonint do_memory_split 16

     4. make it read-only.

    sudo raspi-config nonint enable_overlayfs
    sudo systemctl reboot

     In this way, the available memory of the RPi3A+ will increase from 181MB->339MB and the writable area of the Overlay will be the same, from 89M->88M.

View all 9 project logs

  • 1
    Panel Creation

    First, we create the panels for the body: there is a 2d cad file in /hardware/cad in the github repository, which we print out in full size. Using this as a template, create the following body panel.

    • Top panel x 1
    • Bottom panel x 1
    • Front panel x 1
    • Rear panel x 1
    • Side panel x 2
    • Crawler cover x 2

      Aluminum composite plate or 2mm aluminum plate is suitable for the material. Aluminum composite panels are so easy to process that they can be cut with a cutter, but they are not very strong. Processing aluminum sheets is a little more difficult, but using a sheet metal service will greatly reduce efforts. Tools needed for do-it-yourself machining include a jigsaw that can cut soft steel, 3.2mm, 4mm, 6mm, 12mm, 18mm, and 20mm steel drills, and a rasp file.

    • 2
      Assemble the chassis

      First, bolt on steel angles to secure the bottom and side panels. The front and rear panels are secured with aluminum angles cut short and glued in place. Once the adhesive is dry, fill the gaps with sealant.

    • 3
      Fixing of roller shaft

      Insert 70 mm M4 bolts to hold the rollers for the crawler and secure with nuts.

    View all 14 instructions

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    Discussions

    Yuta Suito wrote 05/17/2023 at 03:17 point

    Weeds are not currently identified. Pylons on all four sides are identified by object detection (yolov7). The distance can be estimated by the height of the visible pylons, so the turning timing is gradually accelerated to advance from the outside to the inside.

      Are you sure? yes | no

    chris owens wrote 05/16/2023 at 15:47 point

    How does it identify weeds?

      Are you sure? yes | no

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